I tested it locally: if it works fine for ÖAF, it still fails for Skoda. I wonder why this "Š" seems accepted under windows but not by the server. I guess that it is not part of the latin1 charset, but part of the windows-1252 charset... and I cannot switch the database to this Windows chaset. So I restored the "trick" that I used previously for Skoda, and I will still move to mysql5 to have ÖAF working correctly "automatically".